Christine "The Machine"

My wife is a machine. There is no other way to explain it. Whereas I (and I think that most of us would share this particular trait) am sweating and shaky at the top of some of these Big Sur hills, Christine, strangely, seems unfazed. No apparent hard breathing. She doesn't even sweat. She just sits in her saddle, and cranks up the hills.

I first started noticing her odd behavior in Oregon when, after a particularily brutal climb of 1000' we reached a stopping point to an overlook another 100' up a hill. We left our bikes at the bottom of the hill and Christine started to RUN up the hill. My suspicions were seeded at that point.

And now, after these last few days of Big Sur, what started as sort of a vague suspicion has cemented itself in my realm of belief. She also doesn't like to go fast downhill. At first I thought it was just because she didn't like the speed, especially with the wobbly trailer. Now I know that its because if she were to fall her "skin" would be scraped away, exposing all of the circuit boards and pistons under there.

Of course this poses a number of potentially difficult questions for the future. What if the power goes out? Is she battery-powered? How long does it last? If not, and she is powered by internal combustion, what happens if oil supplies decline? Is rust an issue? The list goes on and on...

Anyhow, you get some sense here of all of the things that we are learning about each other. We are in Morro Bay now, just a few days out of Santa Barbara, with the trip, sadly, actually starting to wind down. Its hard to believe. Yesterday we visited Hearst Castle, and saw our first male elephant seals neck to neck in the surf. Pretty powerful stuff there...

- Ian